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Zuckerberg, wife gift $120M to California schools

Published on NewsOK
Modified: May 30, 2014 at 5:06 pm •
Published: May 30, 2014

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FILE- In this July 9, 2011, file photo, Mark Zuckerberg, president and CEO of Facebook, walks to morning sessions with his then girlfriend Priscilla Chan during the 2011 Allen and Co. Sun Valley Conference, in Sun Valley, Idaho. Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, announced Thursday May 29, 2014 they are donating $120 million to the San Francisco Bay Area's public school system. Zuckerberg and Chan, a pediatrician, discussed the donation in an exclusive interview with the Associated Press. (AP Photo/Julie Jacobson)

Zuckerberg said the Newark experience is a "big influence on our thinking" with the Bay Area donation. Taking the long view, he's quick to point out that the results in New Jersey are too early to measure.

"The schools and programs that the folks put in place, only now are they ramping up and students are starting to go through them. So you won't know what the outcomes are until like 5, 7, 10 years from now," he said. "That said, I think there are some things that are going generally better than we'd expected and some things that we've definitely taken as lessons."

One of the positive outcomes Zuckerberg points to: Newark's teacher contracts, which, among other things, provide for performance-based pay bonuses for the district's best teachers.

Zuckerberg acknowledges that he and local leaders could have done a better job engaging the community and soliciting ideas about how to spend the money.

Chan, 29, and Zuckerberg, 30, have made philanthropy a central theme of their life together. The two made the largest charitable gift on record for 2013. That $1.1 billion donation was on top of another $500 million the couple gave a year earlier to the Silicon Valley foundation, which helps donors allocate their gifts.

Last year, Zuckerberg was No. 21 on the Forbes list of the world's richest people, right behind Amazon's Jeff Bezos and ahead of well-known billionaires such as activist investor Carl Icahn and philanthropist George Soros. He owns Facebook stock worth over $27 billion. In 2013, as the median yearly pay for U.S. CEOs crossed the $10 million mark amid a widening income gap, Zuckerberg took a symbolic annual salary of $1.